Online advertisements are created with the goal of having the advertisements viewed, listened to, or otherwise received by a target audience. The target audience may be, for example, one or more users with a set of particular interests or one or more users falling into a particular demographic or psychographic group. However, distributing such advertisements to the desired audience is a difficult process. It is often difficult for brand managers, ad networks, publishers, advertisers, and/or advertising agencies (collectively referred to herein as “advertisers”) to control and manage the service of their advertisements.
For example, online advertisements allow the publishers of well-viewed websites to derive a profit from their web traffic. To do this, these website publishers can place an advertisement tag on their webpages, which causes the webpage to load additional content that is delivered by an advertisement network. Such an advertisement tag includes an advertisement as well as code that records or otherwise detects the viewer's interaction with a particular webpage. In return, the website publisher can be compensated by the advertisement network as viewers view the advertisement and/or interact with the advertisement.
There is therefore a need in the art for approaches for controlling and managing the distribution of advertisements for publication on websites. For example, advertisers are concerned with managing the distribution of their advertisements for publication on websites that are engaging in suspicious activity, such as bot fraud, click fraud, advertisement impression fraud, or other deceptive behavior. In a more particular example, to perform bot fraud, these website publishers create a webpage that is capable of hosting advertisements and then run an application that simulates human interaction with this webpage by simulating viewing and/or clicking on an online advertisement presented on the webpage. As the advertisement network compensates the website publisher as it records interaction with the webpage, this allows the website publisher to receive compensation even though no human user has viewed the advertisement. By using a cloud computing environment or by infecting devices with malicious code, such a bot fraud application can be run on many devices at the same time. Bot fraud and other fraudulent advertisement activity diverts advertising money from legitimate website publishers, thereby reducing the effectiveness of online advertisements and their budgets.
Although various approaches attempt to counter click or bot fraud, such approaches remain ineffective as programmers of bot fraud applications are generally capable of writing programs which generate mouse traces and perform other operations that are very similar to those generated by human users.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide methods, systems, and media that overcome these and other deficiencies in the prior art.